Introduction
Tucked in the right corner of a room at the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois’s “American Negro Exhibit” attracted thousands of visitors with its walls of photographs and boldly designed charts. The project was presented nearly nearly forty years after emancipation and highlighted the accomplishments of Black communities during this period.1
Du Bois’s choice to exhibit Black advancement stood in contrast to his other work, which emphasized the extreme inequalities and racial discrimination plaguing the country at the turn of the century. Like white racial scholars, he also drew upon Census, crime, and social survey data to construct narratives about was frequently called the ‘Race Question.’ However, while well-versed in the languages of statistics and methodology, Du Bois understood their limits in documenting human experiences. “The best available methods of sociological research,” he wrote, “are at present so liable to inaccuracies that the careful student discloses the results of individual research with diffidence.” With the impediments of quantitative tools in mind, Du Bois confronted harmful myths about Black criminality, immorality, and biological inferiority that circulated around his field. He challenged Frederick Hoffman, president of the American Statistics Association, on the methodological errors and prejudiced judgments that so often concealed themselves through the veil of scientific authority. Ultimately, Du Bois and other Black leaders interrogated how numbers themselves can play a role in dismantling such oppressive notions.2
In the century since the “American Negro Exhibit,” the practice of data visualization has dramatically evolved in tandem with developments in graphic design, social statistics, and the statistical knowledge state. This paper addresses the prospects, limitations, and implications of using data visualization in representing bodies and discourses surrounding the carceral system. Specifically, I ask how these portraits intervene in representations of those the system entangles, a system which so frequently neglects humanity to those it holds captive. I respond to this question by discussing the necessary ways in which data visualizations can represent scale, social context, and alternatives to policing and prisons to visually denaturalize the carceral imagination in our daily lives.
Figure 1: Photographs from American Negro Exhibit. Library of Congress. Digital ID: loc.gov/pictures/item/00651765/
Figure 2: Occupation and Population Charts from American Negro Exhibit. Library of Congress. Digital ID: loc.gov/pictures/item/2005676812/
Journalists, academics, and think tanks often omit discussions of their internal deliberations that led them to produce data visualizations. Consequently, these oversights complicate my ability to produce critiques of contemporary work. The achievements and shortcomings of data visualizations do not simply materialize in their final graphics. Rather, they are determined through a series of choices, from the collection of data itself to the creation of visualization themselves. Because of this, my analysis of previous data visualizations can only offer suggestions based on their final outcomes. Initiatives for reproducibility and ethical visualization workflows would help alleviate this issue.3
Data visualizations, what are they?
The United States Census Bureau defines data visualizations as “graphics [that] visually display measured quantities by means of the combined use of points, lines, a coordinate system, numbers, words, shading, and color.” This definition, while limited to only which can be computationally mapped, interrupts the notion that data visualizations should be limited to common representations such as pie charts and line graphs. Counts, proportions, and regressions can also be organized in tables, lists, and illustrations. Throughout daily life, individuals and groups encounter and generate data through various means. What binds any visual representation to normative data visualizations is their connection between statistical data and visual rhetoric.4
One of the most defining features of data is that they are both empirically and practically limited to what is countable. These two constraints inform the types of questions for which quantiative tools can be suitable answers. Angela Davis, for example, argues that the prison-industrial complex, with its “array of relationships linking corporations, government, correctional communities, … and the media” could never be properly represented with numbers. Because of the expansive nature of prisons and the inherent abstraction of numbers, she “[hesitates] to make unmediated… use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex.”5
Statisticians, data scientists, activists, and academics must also contend with the invisible biases of historical data, how they reproduce “common sense” ideas about Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, and disguise these conclusions as self-evident knowledge. Data does not simply retell material conditions. They are also informed by the ways in which information is collected, calculated, and published. These various human interventions reveal the importance of interrogating historical data for their reliability. As some scholars attempt to rectify these issues through their combining of several data sources, it may also be worthwhile to consider these data within their respective contexts. Instead, analysts can ask: what do these data realistically measure, what humans and systematic biases do they contain, and how are these statistics relevant to my questions or goals?6
Beyond statistics, data visualizations are also influenced by the properties of art and visual rhetoric. By combining aesthetics, colors, scales, and other visual ingredients, graphic representations can dismantle the “linear logic” inherent to the left-to-right flow of English language on the page. These disrputions are crucial for efforts to denaturalize prisons and introduce new understandings of the carceral system. As James Bucky Carter writes, “‘seeing’ is more bout experiencing, of course, than about base vision, an extension of the literal, scientific notion of sight into something more akin to understanding; something more akin to transcended comprehension; something more akin to… literacy” Increasingly, activists and critical prisons scholars have acknowledged the importance of such literacy, which captures the affective, cognitive, and emotional means by which we experience life itself.7
The graphic nature of data visualizations also illuminate the ways in which the carceral system appears and fades throughout everyday life. They can, for instance, calculate trends and aggregates that cannot be easily determined on an individual-to-individual basis. In 2006, Cornell University’s Spatial Science Lab pursued one such task with their “Million Dollar Block” project, which included a group of visualizations about the “mass migration” of New Yorkers to outside prisons. The solar-flare like image not only emphasizes the great distances that prisoners are forced to move, but it also leads viewers to reflect on how such hidden processes affects inmates and families.8
Yet the lab’s lack of discussion on this human toll impedes its ability to denaturalize inmate relocation. Perhaps their difficulty to communicate these effects stems from the nature of the data itself, which the lab acknowledges was painstakingly acquired from the criminal justice system. Still, the red lines themselves only capture one dimension of the migration: its physical movement. As a result, the million dollar project reaffirms a perception of data that is confined to only one way of seeing.
Figure 3: Million Dollar Blocks Project. Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research. Digital ID: c4sr.columbia.edu/projects/million-dollar-blocks
The limited dimensionality of data visualizations helps explain Du Bois’s decision to pair the aggregates and trends from his graphs with the faces and lives they represent. A chart documenting the average annual budgets of Black families in Georgia, for instance, was paired next to 8 pages of individual families. Placed adjacent to another panel with images of students, families, woodworkers, and lawyers, the graphs were augmented by biographical that they were unable to convey. Without these portraits, Du Bois understood that the humanity underlying these financial mechanisms would be left to an imagination that is so often informed by harmful narratives about Black people.9
Figure 4: Income, Expenditures, and Budget Charts from American Negro Exhibit, Library of Congress. Digital ID: loc.gov/pictures/item/2013650355/
Scale
As both the Spatial Science Lab and Du Bois’s work exhibit, data visualizations have inherent strengths and constraints that shape one’s ability to represent the carceral system’s vast machinery and impacts. These characteristics becomes particularly relevant when attempting to display the scale of mass incarceration and policing.
In 2016, for example, jails admitted a record 10.6 million people. On its own, this tremendous number captures something large yet cognitively graspable. Activists and scholars argue that comprehensibility works against the mission of prison abolition since it maintains the straightforward logic of the current system. “Numbers themselves,” Davis writes in Are Prisons Obsolete, “would defy the imagination were they not so neatly classified and rationally organized.” In the succeeding paragraphs, she concedes this point by including the statistical breakdown of detention facilities across the country. Her choice to include these numbers despite her hesitation represented a compromise between their accessibility the necessarily inaccessible call for prison abolition. Like the brevity of the book, the inclusion of statistical evidence is also tied to political efficacy. Without backing her claims with numbers, Davis would have produced a less digestible to her viewers.10
How then, can data visualizations represent scale in ways that both denaturalize prisons and disturb conventional representations? Five years ago, Mona Chalabi and the Prison Policy Initiative created an illustration that represented the annual 10.6 million jail admissions in a way that was intentionally less palatable. The graphic specifically emphasizes the enormity of this number by repeating a small portrait of a person in an orange jumpsuit across the webpage. In contrast to the number 10,600,000, which only takes a moment to read, Chalabi’s graphic takes an an arduous and minutes-long process. As an individual views more and more individual orange boxes accumulate on their screen, there is an intentional overstimulation of the senses. Perhaps a reader may not have a screen with a resolution large enough to handle the small details of the image, leading the individual lines of each box to flicker and glitch.
Beyond its unsettling effect, Chalabi’s data visualization also discusses the invisible effects of jail time. Shortly after scrolling through one week of admissions, one will read: “One week: 204,000 admissions. 40% of all jail deaths occur within one week of admission.” The rest of the graphic regularly introduces facts and dates between the flow of orange boxes, denoting dates and events like the beginning of the school year and the holidays. The blocks of text also discuss the toll of confinement itself, specifically its deteriorative effects on mental health and family stability. Still, like Davis, Chalabi’s graphic negotiates a common trade-off with displaying statistics about the carceral system. Any project about the scale of the carceral system will struggle to investigate individual stories for both unintentional and practical reasons.
Ava DuVarnay’s 13th similarly emphasizes the massification of jails and prisons. Interspersed with commentary from scholars, activists, and politicians, the documentary explores the historical surveillance and confinement of America’s Black population from Post-Civil War convict leasing to the regimes of Jim Crow and mass incarceration. DuVarney’s connection between enslavement and incarceration not only exposes the similarities between their economic, racial, and political contexts, but also their comparable scales. Near the end of the film, Senator Cory Booker remarks: “We now have more African Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850s.” This emphasis on the growing accumulation of bodies in confinement is augmented by visuals tracing the trajectory of mass incarceration.11
Figure 5: U.S. Prison Population (1970-2016). 13th.
The graphic above is one such image and guides the viewer’s attention specifically to the increase between 2010 and 2016. Between its chronological segments, the documentary frequently returned to a counter of the prison population. As each decade passed in the film, the scale of the prison growth also increased, illustrating the “massification” of a prison system consuming more and more of the country’s population.
With few exceptions, 13th mostly excludes the individual stories behind these enormous numbers. However, this focus shifts as the documentary discusses Black victims of police violence. Beginning with a series of videos documenting incidents of police brutality and the family members they affected, the documentary displays a graphic titled “Unarmed Black Victims by Police,” including the name of the individual, their date of death, and how they were killed. This visual is underpinned by Michelle Alexander’s statement that “police violence… isn’t the problem in and of itself.” She continues: “Police violence is reflective of a greater system of surveillance and control.” While the visualization is marred by its inability to deliberately humanize each victim of police violence, the documentary succeeds in threading the legacy of racism and the historical surveillance of Black Americans led American society to its era of mass police violence.12
Like 13th’s graphic of unarmed black victims by police, Ida B. Wells’s pamphlet The Red Record brings together the various mechanisms that made large-scale scenes of racial terror possible, while attempting to humanize those it affects in the process. Similar to Davis’s book on the prison-industrial complex, Wells chooses to keep The Red Record short. Of its 100 pages, 14 are dedicated to the names and descriptions of lynching victims. This use of space is visually intentional, implicitly reaffirming the humanity of Black Americans during a regime of violence that worked to the opposite.13
Figure 6: Ida Barnett-Wells’s manuscript for a A Red Record (1892). Library of Congress. Digital ID: hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.40021
Concurrently, Wells aggregated these lynching records to test hypotheses about the underlying motivations behind lynchings. As a journalist, Wells had reported numerous horrifying scenes of terror in the South. These incidents informed her argument that white mobs mobilized to maintain structures of political and economic dominance as well as reproduce entrenched fears of Black masculinity and interracial relationships. By combining her journalistic research with a quantitative analysis of lynching’s scale, Wells energized anti-lynching advocacy and earned the support of politicians domestically and abroad.14
Social Context, Mechanisms of Control
As Wells argues in The Red Record, American society constantly reinvents myths about Black mortality, criminality, and immorality. Throughout her career, white racial scholars encoded many of these these assumptions into data under the veil of objective and authoritative methods. Harvard scientist Nathanial Southgate Shaler, for instance, wielded U.S. Census data to argue for the disenfranchisement of African Americans. “I am far from blaming the Southern whites for their actions in summarily excluding the enfranchised race from political advancement,” he wrote. “The ignorance of these Africans, their general lack of all of the instincts of a freeman, have made this course, it seems to me, for the time at least, imperatively necessary.”15
Du Bois, one of Shaler’s students, acknowledged the dangers of reinforcing harmful narratives about Black people and began writing on the importance of understanding data under the contexts it is produced. In The Philadelphia Negro, for example, Du Bois draws upon census data and illustrates the comparable health outcomes of Black communities to international populations with similar social conditions. Consequently, in preparation for the “American Negro Exhibit,” he chose to display similar findings of population growth to combat myths about Black biological inferiority. By revealing Europeans’ higher mortality rates compared to African Americans, Du Bois directly led his audience to consider the fallacies of the “extinction thesis.”16
Figure 7: Population charts from the American Negro Exhibit. Library of Congress. Digital ID: loc.gov/pictures/item/2013650372/
Aware of these circulating narratives about Black Americans, Du Bois understood the difficulty of confronting statistical authorities that veiled their prejudices as objective truths. Frederick Hoffman, the statistician that posited the extinction thesis, was one such figure that reinforced the authoritative positioning of racial science. He began his chapter titled “Vital Statistics of the Negro” by noting a commitment to the scientific method. “Science is a collection of facts,” he argued,“and it it is in the sense of this definition that I propose to the so-called negro problem.”17
The “negro problem,” he then defined, was an issue of essentialist differences of health. Drawing upon mortality statistics from several southern cities to draw a distinction between “white” and “colored” populations, Hoffman constructed a table that visually emphasizes his comparison of descriptive statistics as the leading evidence of these differences.18
Figure 8: Annual rate of mortality per 1,000 of living population, by race. ‘Vital Statistics of the Negro’
The table’s presentation, with its neatly-drawn lines and divisions, framed the mortality differences between white and Black people as oppositional to each other. It also left any underlying mechanisms behind these health disparities to the reader’s imagination, facilitating Hoffman’s argument of innate differences between racial groups. The “facts” behind observed disparities, he explained, stemmed from drug use and sexually-transmitted diseases. Their “gross immortality, early and excessive intercourse of the sexes, premature maternity, and general intemperance in eating and drinking,” Hoffman wrote, led to their observed high mortality rates. He then extrapolated his data to argue that these high mortality rates would lead to the extinction of the “negro race.”19
In response to Hoffman’s paper, Du Bois called his scientific method into question. There were no citations, Du Bois wrote, of studies that find racial predispositions for drinking and intercourse in southern Black communities. Instead, Hoffman defended his claims with a promise that “any physician that has practiced among colored people will bear [him] out” The first visual representation of Hoffman’s paper, while not directly responsible, laid the grounds for these fabricated conclusions by allowing the numbers to stand in for the histories and contexts that produced them. Du Bois also inverted Hoffman’s authoritative rhetoric by acknowledging that he failed to follow his own call for principled science. Hoffman may have confessed that his data was incomplete and potentially unreliable, but he did not address these limitations in his conclusions.20
While both Hoffman and Du Bois compared mortality rates among different populations, Du Bois’s presentation of data in an international context more easily permitted his audience to consider social environments, and, by extension, these groups’ own humanities. In contrast, Hoffman’s conclusions exploited well-circulated myths about a group that was already deeply pathologized.
In a modern context, data visualizations can draw comparisons across international contexts to center the underlying mechanisms and impacts behind a country’s carceral system. The nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative’s article “States of Incarceration,” for instance, reveals that American states with the lowest incarceration rates still greatly surpass those of other countries. One plot specifically focuses on North Carolina, a state slightly below the U.S. average, and compares its incarceration rate to other founding NATO countries. One of the first things a viewer will notice about this visualization is that both North Carolina and the United States extend beyond the black borders of the graph. In this way, the graphic shatters notions of normalcy and exceptionalism centered in the American ethos. “All states,” the organization writes, “have to aim higher striving to not just be better than the worst U.S. states, but among the most fair and just in the world.”21
Figure 9: Incarceration rates comparing North Carolina and NATO countries. Prison Policy Initiative. Digital ID: prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html
The Prison Policy Initiative also dispels arguments that variations in incarceration rates directly stem from differences in “violent crime” [note about the policy initiative defining this term]. One scatterplot aligns these two variables and reveals that countries with higher crime rates like France, Belgium, and Brazil still detain lower proportions of their residents than the United States. The organization concludes that prison policy is “not a rational response to high crime rate, but rather a politically expedient response to public fears and perceptions about crime and violence.” Other articles written by the Prison Policy Initiative are hyperlinked throughout the article, inviting readers to meditate on the lineage of decisions that led the United States to this moment.22
Figure 10: Incarceration rate by violent crime rate. Prison Policy Initiative. Digital ID: prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html
Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer’s depiction of global incarceration in Race to Incarcerate similarly compares the United States to other countries but visually foregrounds the cramped and uncomfortable experience of life behind bars. This choice emphasizes the humanity of those behind the book’s statistics while still retaining essential characteristics of bar graphs. As a result, Jones and Mauer display how conventional visualizations can affirm both their viewers and the people they represent.23
The graphic also interrupts the argument that the United States should simply mirror what the Prison Policy Initiative defines as “fair and just” countries. Regardless of their length, each bar emphasizes the cruelty that incarceration dispenses. Additionally, the book later explores how parts of international prison policy were exported from the United States during its War on Drugs. Carceral states continue to learn from one another, Jones and Mauer argue, and for this reason advocacy must also draw inspiration from alternatives that do not exist yet.
Figure 11: The number of prisoners in the United States. Race to Incarcerate.
Even within countries, visualizations like the “Million Dollar Blocks” project illustrate the inner mechanisms of prisons and policing. One of the project’s graphs, for example, shades blocks across five cities based on their annual cost of prison expenditures. Importantly, the lab argues that these huge investments result from cuts in other areas such as education, housing, and health. In other words, the large-scale surveillance of certain neighborhoods was not inevitable. Rather, it was an outcome contingent on the repeated failing of certain communities’ well-beings.24
Figure 12: Prison expenditures in Brooklyn, NY. Columbia Unviersity Center for Spatial Research. Digital ID: c4sr.columbia.edu/projects/million-dollar-blocks
This context provokes new questions to the reader. Why are certain areas policed more than others? How are prison expenditures defined, and what are the missing costs that the million dollar project poses? By leaving these questions unaddressed, however, the viewer is forced to draw upon common sense ideas about policing and criminality.
Lois Ahren’s The Real Cost of Prisons Comix similarly explains how million dollar blocks arose from deliberate divestments from drug-prevention, healthcare, and job training, and towards more punitive and harmful policies. Unlike the Spatial Lab, however, the comic discusses why certain areas are policed more than others. “In New York,” one blurb writes, “75% of the prisoners come from 7 African-American and Latino neighborhoods” and more than half of these prisoners are charged with non-violent drug offenses. The illustrations of Black and Latino residents being targeted by cops offers a more truthful representation of neighborhoods that are pathologized through cycles of state-enacted violence. In contrast, the Spatial Lab’s “Million Dollar Blocks” project, another work centered around geographic variation, leaves absent the street-level imbalances of policing and imprisonment.25
Figure 13: Million dollar blocks. Real Cost of Prisons Comix.
One section in Race to Incarcerate titled “The War on Drugs and African Americans” traces the history underpinning these imbalances. In this chapter, the comics are created with space and proportions in mind. The title page alone foreshadows the principle argument of the section by displaying the word “African Americans” as a shadow of a wall called “the War on Drugs.” The relationship between these two objects inverts the popular notion that the War on Drugs was created in response to dangerous Black communities. Instead, as Hinton writes, the War on Drugs “is best understood not as an effort to broadly uplift communities or as a moral crusade, but as manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.” (32) Subsequent images also contribute to this argument, such as a bar chart comparing the makeup of African Americans in various populations. Rather than compare across races, Mauer and Jones consider the proportions of Black people to the total population as well as their total number of drug arrests. This graphic is intentionally placed next to a section with Black and white boys of equal height. Alongside the text, which says “Blacks and whites have about the same rate of drug use,” the proportions of the two boys visually affirm this message. Together, the comic presents a nexus of political, economic, and affective considerations that led our system to incarcerate people from pathologized communities. [^Mauer, Marc, and Sabrina Jones. Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling. The New Press, 2013, 178]
Figure 14: The war on drugs and African-Americans. Real Cost of Prisons Comix.
Alternatives to Policing and Imprisonment
Beyond the War on Drugs’s effects, graphic books can also visually constructs a counter-story. What would happen, alternatively, if governments invested these millions of dollars to support communities? Using statistics alongside utopian illustrations of youth caring flower gardens and symbols of family and community, Real Cost of Prisons Comix appeals to its audience’s emotions as it presents this possibility. Mauer and Jones also use statistics to convince the reader that alternatives to imprisonment are not only more humane but also economically efficient. One graphic titled: “The Cost of a Cage,” uses proportions to represent the cost of one year of imprisonment equaling approximately 19 years of community college. The visual representation of these two realities, a downcast man behind bars and another actively participating at their classroom desk, reaffirms the comic’s moral argument for the redistribution of funds away from policing and towards a social safety net.26
Figure 15: Alternatives to policing and imprisonment. Real Cost of Prisons Comix.
Shabazz similarly explores alternatives to Chicago’s confinement and surveillance in the last chapter of Spatializing Blackness. Specifically, he argues that the Black Belt’s repurposing of space for community gardens reveals a path for architectural resistance. While acknowledging that green spaces cannot rectify over a century of segregation and policing, Shabazz believes they can inspire Chicago’s Black community to continue calling for greater agency over the distribution of their space and resources.27
Shabazz’s discussion of urban space parallels movements by prison reformers and abolitionists to rethink current systems of confinement. Since the 1970’s, the United States has largely abandoned earlier projects of prisoner rehabilitation and instead “advocated an increasingly hardline towards law breakers.” In response to these developments, the Vera Institute of Justice and Model of Architecture Saving Society (MASS) proposed blueprints that illustrate what a “therapeutic” American prison would look like. Two visualizations in particular uses color to illustrate the ways in which prisons can spatially and temporally support therapy for their residents. In the first one, the viewer is quickly drawn to notice how little punitive and even protective prisons support spaces that support its inmates’ wellbeing, which are shaded purple. In contrast, roughly half of a therapeutic prison’s non-residential space support the education, recreation, and treatment of its inmates. While the visualizations are used to promote reforms for prisons, the graphics also call to question what would remain the same under MASS’s model such as large spaces dedicated to prison industries and administrations. These choices illustrate a societal imagination of incarceration that could not exist without the prison-industrial complex.28
Figure 16: Reimagining prison. Vera Institute of Justice. Digital ID: vera.org/projects/reimagining-prison
Figure 17: Reimagining prison. Vera Institute of Justice. Digital ID: vera.org/projects/reimagining-prison
Besides their revisioning of incarceration and policing, prison abolitionists and reformers have also used visual rhetoric to promote new understandings of political strategies and mobilization. Nat Smith and Eric Stanley’s Captive Gender specifically reflects on the political trajectory of queer and trans rights movements and how their“official” apparatuses have often advocated for policies that expand the carceral state in name of equality. In a table titled “Current Landscape,” the authors raises this point through the lenses of several “big problems” faced by the LGBTQIA+ individuals.29
Figure 18: The current landscape. Captive Genders.
The table is visually powerful in the way it bifurcates the community into its ‘official’ and ‘transformative’ wings. Doing so reveals the limits of certain policy recommendations like gay marriage and hate crime legislation that is popularly represented in queer discourses. In many respects, these policies worsen the conditions of poor, working-class, and non-cisgender peoples by increasing their exposure to the police and the criminal justice system. [cite] Additionally, the visual representation is both analogous to the educational-tone of Captive Genders as well as the experiences of their audience. As mentioned previously in the cases of Angela Davis and Ida B. Wells, political materials seeking to broaden the public’s perspective must often represent their ideas in ways that are understandable yet challenging. Smith and Stanley’s table similarly presents alternatives to popular policies in a way that is familiar to their readers. From political advertisements to shopping websites and tax forms, the neat lines and organization of tables is analogous to ways in which many people experience life.30
These clear delineations, however, come at the cost of ideological debate between the ‘official’ and ‘transformative’ points of view. If a policy is not ‘transformative,’ it is not necessarily sanctioned by the ‘official’ gay rights agenda. Likewise, all unofficial policy recommendations will not necessarily suit Smith and Stanley’s cross-class queer and trans agenda. By restricting the liminal space between between the two wings of the LGBTQIA+ community, the authors ignore how most queer and trans progress, and more importantly, the abolition and reform of prisons, will be achieved. Like Hoffman’s comparisons of Black and white mortality, Smith and Stanley’s polar representation of queer activism restricts their ability to consider options in-between the ‘transformative’ and ‘official’ wings.
Conclusion
Even if not directly tied to statistics and data, Smith and Stanley’s tables illustrate how data visualizations can appeal to audiences in ways that extend beyond comprehension. Just as graphics must extend humanity to those within their data, they must also acknowledge their viewers’ collection of emotions and experiences. Following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Chalabi produced one data visualization that approximated the amount of money spent on the NYPD based amount of time it takes to cross three popular New York City bridges. By putting these sums in terms that are more understandable to her audience, Chalabi’s graphic more successfully advocates against exorbitant police expenditures.31
Figure 19: NYPD budgets measured in commute time. Mona Chalabi. Digital ID: instagram.com/monachalabi/
Beyond scale, data visualizations can also represent data’s social contexts. Comparisons across national boundaries, like Du Bois’s “American Negro Exhibit,” can dispel notions of innate racial differences. Similarly, the The Real Cost of Prison Comix discusses the underlying history and racial stratification of policing behind “million dollar blocks” to augment its shocking statistics. The interrogation of data and the series of decisions that produced them, in other words, is an interrogation of history and common sense. Without exploring these forces, users of data visualization run the risk of reproducing the harmful narratives that created their data.
Lastly, graphic representations of data can denaturalize the carceral state itself and shed light on its possible alternatives. Previous data visualizations, from Real Cost of Prisons Comix’s “Cost of Cages” to the Vera Institute’s prison architecture proposal, reveal that the current state of mass incarceration was not inevitable. Instead, these outcomes were contingent on series of choices that can still be altered today. As users of data visualization continue to grapple with the system as it exists today, their critical projects must also further a vision that connects to the lives both within and outside of their data.
Timeline
Rusert, Britt, and Whitney Battle-Baptiste. 2018. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits : Visualizing Black America. Princeton Architectural Press.↩︎
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, and Isabel Eaton. 1899. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Publications of the University of Pennsylvania; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro: Review.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.↩︎
Hepworth, Katherine, and Christopher Church. “Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects.” 2018. Digital Humanities Quarterly. Also see Gillborn, David, Paul Warmington, and Sean Demack. “QuantCrit: Education, Policy, ‘Big Data’ and Principles for a Critical Race Theory of Statistics.” Race Ethnicity and Education 21, no. 2 (March 4, 2018).↩︎
“Communicating With Census Data: Data Visualization.” United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2017/demo/communicating-with-census-data-data-visualization.html.↩︎
Davis, Angela Y. “The Prison-Industrial Complex.” In Are Prisons Obsolete?. 84,92. Seven Stories Press, 2011.↩︎
For “common sense” see Heatherton, Christina. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, 103-113. Verso Books, 2016; Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. “Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem.” In The Condemnation of Blackness. Harvard University Press, 2019.↩︎
Girard, Jean-Yves. Advances in Linear Logic. Cambridge University Press, 1995; Carter, James Bucky. “Introduction: Visualizing and Visually Representing” SANE Journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 1, no. 3 (2013). 2.↩︎
Tapia, Ruby C. “Profane Illuminations: The Gendered Problematics of Critical Carceral Visualities.” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 684–88. doi:10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.684; “Million Dollar Blocks.” Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University. Center for Spatial Research. https://c4sr.columbia.edu/projects/million-dollar-blocks.↩︎
Rusert, Britt, and Whitney Battle-Baptiste. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Princeton Architectural Press, 2018, 37-50.↩︎
Sawyer, Wendy. “Artist Collaboration: Visualizing 10.6 Million Jail Admissions Each Year.” Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/22/chalabi/; Davis, Angela Y. “The Prison-Industrial Complex.” In Are Prisons Obsolete?, 84. Seven Stories Press, 2011.↩︎
DuVernay, Ava. 13th. Kandoo Films, 2016.↩︎
DuVarney’s connection between slavery and mass incarceration stems from Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow. The New Press, 2010.↩︎
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895.↩︎
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895, 10-12.↩︎
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness. Harvard University Press, 2019, 42.↩︎
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, and Isabel Eaton. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, 1899.↩︎
Hoffman, Frederick L. “Vital Statistics of the Negro.” The Arena (1889-1909). April 1892, 529.↩︎
Ibid, 534.↩︎
Ibid, 535↩︎
Ibid; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro: Review.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9, no. 1 (July 1, 1897): 127–33. doi:10.1177/000271629700900108.↩︎
Widra, Emily, and Tiana Herring. “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2021.” Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html.↩︎
Ibid↩︎
Mauer, Marc, and Sabrina Jones. Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling. The New Press, 2013.↩︎
Ibid↩︎
Ahrens, Lois. Real Cost of Prisons Comix. PM Press, 2008, 33↩︎
Ahrens, Lois. Real Cost of Prisons Comix. PM Press, 2008, 37-43.↩︎
Shabazz, Rashad. “Epilogue: Fertile Ground.” In Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 2015.↩︎
Delaney, Ruth. “Reimagining Prison.” Vera Institute of Justice, October 10, 2018. https://www.vera.org/projects/reimagining-prison.↩︎
Stanley, Eric, and Nat Smith. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. AK Press, 2011, 16↩︎
Ibid, 17↩︎
Chalabi, Mona (@monachalabi). 2020 “It’s hard to get your head around huge numbers like $5.9 BILLION so let’s figure it out together.” Instagram, June 28, 2020 posted. https://www.instagram.com/p/CB_F-5cl0aZ/↩︎